the user made tods are terrible(unless u like your game looking like blurry vaseline pea soup). the only thing u can improve over vanilla very high is pushing out the lod levels which has diminishing returns at levels higher than very high already has them.

Yep, mostly, but that's still better than "very high". Also, you can, at your preference reduce the quality of certain things that you can't really notice anyways, or give questionable quality benefit. For instance, IMO using shaderShadows = 3 gives pretty crummy looking shadows. By lowering the shader complexity (which seems the pretty much just target penumbra) you give yourself a nice boost in framerate and quality. There are also some other shadow-specific tweaks that give framerate boosts with no real loss of quality. And then using that extra performance you can target things that matter, improving that quality over very high.

and for those skeptical that user made mods can make a positive difference check out hawkeye's work.